In the process of sorting objects that have been mailed, some mail pieces will have addresses that cannot be fully read by existing Optical Character/Bar Code reading systems. One reason for the mail pieces to be unreadable is poor handwriting. In other instances, the address is legible but the object must be forwarded because the recipient has moved. In either case, it is often preferable to resolve the correct destination at once and apply a label to the object. See, in this connection, Allen et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,422,821. Often it is important this label be placed such that it obscures the existing address information to avoid later ambiguity. In this manner the mail piece may be returned to an automation or manual processing stream then sorted and delivered efficiently.
Prior art workstations for manual entry of address information have an operator with a keyboard for data entry, a computer monitor to indicate results and a manual means of applying a label. In some cases the label is printed and the operator picks the label and places it on the object. In other implementations, the operator holds the mail piece in position for an automated label applicator. These prior art methods are inefficient because the operator is involved in each step of the process and events are sequential in that the operator keys the data, waits for the system result and label to print, then applies the label. Commonly, an operator's work pace will be less than 300 pieces per hour or 12 seconds per mail piece because of the embedded wait time. The present invention eliminates much of the wait time and improves the processing capability to double or triple the rate obtainable with the known process.
Thorsten, et al. United States Patent Application 20090110284, Apr. 30, 2009, describes character recognition on an object for automatic processing of the object in a processing system, where the object contains at least one character string of processing information, a character string spoken by an operator is processed by a speech recognition procedure to generate a candidate list containing at least one candidate corresponding to the operator-spoken character string. The candidate list and a digital image of an area containing the processing information are made available for an optical character recognition procedure. The OCR procedure is performed on the digital image in coordination with the candidate list to determine if a character string recognized by the OCR procedure performed on the digital image corresponds to a candidate in the candidate list. Any such corresponding candidate is outputted as the character string on the object.